adhesion

Soft elastic layers with top and bottom surfaces adhered to rigid bodies are abundant in biological organisms and engineering applications. As the rigid bodies are pulled apart, the stressed layer can exhibit various modes of mechanical instabilities. In cases where the layer’s thickness is much smaller than its length and width, the dominant modes that have been studied are the cavitation, interfacial and fingering instabilities. Here we report a new mode of instability which emerges if the thickness of the constrained elastic layer is comparable to or smaller than its width.

Tough bonding of hydrogels to diverse non-porous surfaces

Hyunwoo Yuk, Teng Zhang,Shaoting Lin, German Alberto Parada & Xuanhe Zhao

Nature Materials (2015) doi:10.1038/nmat4463

Two solids can adhere to each other in the presence of a liquid bridge between them, which is called wet adhesion. When the solid is soft, the liquid bridge can cause deformation in the material, and in turn, the deformation may have dramatic effects on the wet adhesion. To investigate the effect, in this article, we calculate the deformation in two soft layers with different separations and connected by a liquid bridge. We illustrate the effect of deformation in the soft layers on the adhesive force.

Dear colleagues,

We cordially invite you to submit your contributions to the following minisymposium: Multiscale Modeling and Simulation of Fracture and Fragmentation Processes taking place as part of the Engineering Mechanics Institute conference (JUne 16-19, 2015) at Stanford.

Best Regards,

Ahmed Elbanna*, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
Glaucio Paulino, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA